The rise of AI moderation agents, KOSA's comeback and Yahoo Boys get banned
Hello and welcome to Everything in Moderation's Week in Review, your in-depth guide to the policies, products, platforms and people shaping the future of online speech and the internet. It's written by me, Ben Whitelaw and supported by members like you.
This week’s TrustCon — the third and largest to date — once again showed itself as the place to take the temperature of the T&S industry. And — despite 18 months of staff cuts, a prolonged period of regulatory wrangling and the added stress of dozens of national elections in 2024 — the people I spoke to seemed (mostly) ready for whatever is coming down the path.
From conversations and panels that I attended, it looks like there'll be a greater focus on the ROI of safety operations, a more joined-up approach to tooling and technology and a wider conversation about who sits under the broader umbrella of T&S. Let’s see what the next 12 months holds and how much the US election puts paid to those plans.
The most fun part for me was hosting our first live recording of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, which you’ll be able to listen to when it drops in the feed later today. You'll also want to look out for T&S Insider on Monday for Alice’s take on the conference.
From San Francisco airport, here's the online safety and content moderation news you might have missed from the last week— BW
Warning: Today’s edition contains mentions of sextortion and suicide.
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Policies
New and emerging internet policy and online speech regulation
We start this week in Malaysia, where reports suggest the government could introduce laws to criminalise cyberbullying following the reported suicide of a TikTok influencer earlier this month. Two people have been charged under the 1998 Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 and Minor Offences Act respectively after 30-year-old Rajewary Appahu took her own life after receiving death and sexual assault threats.
Back story: Malaysia’s attempts to control speech online go back to the late '90s but came back into focus in 2022, when the government updated its Content Code to get online platforms to remove more content. Last year, it threatened Meta with legal action following a spate of what it called a “undesirable posts” (EiM #203).
Two controversial bills — the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) — will face a Senate vote next week that both are expected to pass. Parent groups and children’s advocacy orgs welcomed the news while Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, my Ctrl-Alt-Speech co-host, called them “"do something bills” that “won’t help solve the problems, and are quite likely to make them worse”. Associated Press has a good guide.
Ofcom, the UK’s online safety regulator, has bared its teeth after announcing that it has fined TikTok £1.875m for failing to provide information related to its parent controls feature. The video app took seven months to provide only partial data, which “had a direct impact on our regulatory work”, it said in a release. The request pre-dates the passing of the Online Safety Act but perhaps hints at the regulator’s approach going forward.